Public institutions hold large volumes of sensitive documents and support tickets that cannot leave the premises, ruling out cloud-hosted language models entirely. We report on RAGAL, a retrieval-augmented assistant for the technical-support team of AFIR, the Romanian Agency for Financing Rural Investments, built and operated under three hard constraints: zero data egress (no external API calls, even for synthetic data), a read-only mandate (the assistant drafts, humans execute), and a single 8 GB consumer laptop as the only development and training machine.
arXiv:2606. 10460v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent large language models (LLMs) have shown rapid progress in reading-based question answering (QA), where evidence is explicitly provided or can be trivially retrieved.
By Haonan Wang, Jiaxiang Liu, Yurong Liu, Austin Senna Wijaya, Tianle Zhou, Eden Wu, Yijia Chen, Wanting You, Reya Vir, Daniela Pinto, Grace Fan, Yusen Zhang, Juliana Freire, Eugene Wu
Q2D-Web is a new large‑scale benchmark for agentic Retrieval‑Augmented Generation (RAG) systems, featuring a 190 million‑document web corpus and 70 k machine‑reformulated search queries in ten languages. It supplies three sets of relevance judgments—agent citations, production rankings, and a combined set enriched with LLM‑based labels—to evaluate first‑stage retrievers. Experiments on 13 retrievers show consistent ranking across judgment sets but significant variation across domains, languages, and query types, and demonstrate that a carefully sampled sub‑corpus can approximate full‑corpus evaluation with minimal loss in Recall@1000.
Clarify-Then-Search is a benchmark that tests whether large language models can ask clarification questions to improve the usefulness of deep search results. It uses 518 real-world query pairs from Baidu, where each intent query is paired with an underspecified version. The evaluation involves a clarifier asking up to three questions, a user answerer providing only explicit information, and a rewriter generating a new query that is then searched; performance is measured by a weighted nugget-recall score.
By Deqiang Huang, Jingbo Zhou, Xinjiang Lu, Tong Xu, Hua Wu, Enhong Chen
arXiv:2608. 12282v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Agents deployed in enterprise settings must reason across structured APIs and document collections, yet existing benchmarks evaluate these capabilities in isolation.
By Ankita Rajaram Naik, Anupama Murthi, Benjamin Elder, Siyu Huo, Raavi Gupta, Abhinav Jain, Praveen Venkateswaran, Abdulhamid Adebayo, Danish Contractor
arXiv:2605. 21071v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The rapid progress of large language models (LLMs) is shifting semantic search toward a question-answering paradigm, where users ask questions and LLMs generate responses.
By Souvick Das, Sallam Abualhaija, Domenico Bianculli
arXiv:2607. 26070v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language model (LLM)-based agentic search systems are often evaluated as if the underlying LLM were the only component that matters, yet their measured performance also depends on the surrounding search environment: the Wikipedia snapshot, preprocessing pipeline, chunking policy, retrieval backend, tool schema, observation format, and answer submission rule.
By Guanming Xiong, Penghui Zhang
arXiv:2606. 30473v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We study retrieval over catalogs of structured metadata, where each record is a small schema whose fields answer different kinds of query.
By Aivin V. Solatorio, Olivier Dupriez, Rafael Macalaba
arXiv:2608. 20106v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We introduce OenoBench, a wine-domain knowledge benchmark of 3,266 multiple-choice questions across six pillars (regions, grape varieties, viticulture, winemaking, producers, business) and four difficulty tiers.
By Nikita Khudov
The paper introduces DEPT, a method that trains a single decoder-only large language model to both expand queries and encode documents for retrieval. By preserving document embeddings close to their initial cached values while allowing gradients to flow through the generator, DEPT stabilizes retrieval targets and enables efficient index reuse and online hard‑negative mining. Experiments on the BEIR benchmark with Qwen3‑4B‑Instruct‑2507 and LLaMA‑3.2‑3B‑Instruct show that DEPT outperforms training‑free, independently trained, and staged unified baselines, with ablations confirming the benefits of preservation, whitening, end‑to‑end expansion training, and online negatives.
By Jingyuan Wang, Richong Zhang, Zhijie Nie, Mingxin Li, Yanzhao Zhang
arXiv:2608. 09393v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We identify and quantify temporal misgrounding: the systematic retrieval and citation of the currently in-force version of a legal article when the applicable version is an earlier or future one.
By Rose Cymbler, Daniel Guez, Laurent Fabre
The paper argues that retrieval‑augmented question‑answering systems should perform semantic compilation at ingest time rather than re‑deriving meaning at query time. By building a maintained structure—incrementally updated embeddings and validated atomic claims—read operations become far cheaper, with experimental results showing higher accuracy and lower token usage compared to traditional chunk‑based retrieval. The authors present two proofs: cheaper incremental updates and superior performance on broadcast‑interview transcripts, suggesting a new systems agenda for compilation and read planning.
By Kyle Wild, Yusuke Takahashi, Asako Uraki